Up to the present time, the usual practice in designing sailing craft or sailboats has been to assemble and fix the hull, mast, keel and ballast substantially rigidly together to form an integral unit when in use. The keel is generally heavily weighted and provides a substantial amount of the ballast. With such a design, the lateral wind force acting on the sails causes the entire vessel to heel, with the adverse effects of heeling on the craft including an increase in the wetted surface resulting from an asymmetrical underwater hull shape that tends to cause veering of the craft off-course while increasing the bow wake and resistance to forward movement. This, in turn, increases the tendency of the craft to capsize, as the stability of the boat is decreased.
In the past, various approaches to this problem have been considered, such as the use of a movable ballast shown in Evans U.S. Pat. No. 7,184, or a pivotally mounted mast shown in the Sveinssons U.S. Pat. No. 2,643,628. At best, these solutions have only provided partial answers to the overall problem of heeling by sailing vessels.